ORLANDO, Fla. (Ivanhoe Newswire) — Covid has forced many people to take time off from the gym. When you’re on a hiatus, you might be concerned about losing the progress you’ve built. But new research shows your muscles have memories. Muscle memory
Exercise is the key to a healthy lifestyle. But if you have to put your workouts on pause, you might worry that you’ll lose your gains. Luckily, there’s something called muscle memory!
“As long as you stay active, you’re creating muscle memory, you’re in the process of that,” explained Curtis McGee, an fitness expert.
Here’s how it works: every time you work out, you build a foundation of strength and endurance, so your muscles literally remember what they’re supposed to do.
“So, if I ran a mile, and I’m used to running a mile, and I stop running a mile for a while, and then I begin to start running a mile, there’s a chance that I will adapt to that much faster than never having run a mile,” McGee told Ivanhoe.
A new study conducted in mice suggests you can build muscle memory no matter how long it’s been since you’ve hit the gym. Researchers found animals that participated in weighted-wheel workouts were able to add more muscle more quickly when they retrained after 12 weeks of inactivity compared to the mice that never trained. Twelve weeks is about ten percent of a mouse’s lifespan. Scientists say this study suggests humans’ muscles should remain primed to respond to the exercises when they start again – even years later.
“All you’re doing is recalling it,” said McGee.
The bottom line? No workout is a wasted one!
If you have to take a break from the gym, you might want to up your consumption of protein. In one study, increased protein intake reduced the loss of lean body mass in athletes even when they weren’t training.
Contributors to this news report include: Julie Marks, Producer; Roque Correa, Editor.
Sources:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/05/well/move/muscle-memory-exercise.html
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19927027/
DO YOUR MUSCLES REMEMBER?
REPORT #2943
BACKGROUND: Muscle memory is the act of committing a specific motor task into memory through repetition.
Muscles are full of neurons attached to the nervous system that play a role in motor learning. Many believe muscle memory will allow you to regain muscle size and strength rather quickly. However, it is more the result of learned motor skills and less about muscle growth. When we achieve an increase and growth of muscle cells, our muscle fibers experience an increase in a type of cell known as myonuclei. These cells’ main job is to help us get stronger and increase our muscle fibers’ size. Studies suggest that while muscle fibers can decrease in size when we stop training, the number of myonuclei appears to stay stable even for extended periods of time and in atrophied muscles.
PROS AND CONS OF MUSCLE MEMORY: In learning a new skill, taking breaks between repetitions are highly effective. By monitoring how neural activity in the brain changes during learning a new skill, researchers report that mental “instant replay” after each performance is critical to perfecting the skill. Also, the importance of sleep in improving enduring memories and learning new skills has shown to be effective. In animal experiments, rats learning to negotiate a new maze replay the experience in their brain activity during sleep, which consolidates the experience into memory. These results provide a new understanding at the level of brain function of why taking breaks for off-line mental processing is necessary for learning and adds the important finding that instant replay between practice sessions flashes extremely rapidly through the brain. Muscle memory is learned movement, whether the movement is correct or not. So, if you practice a movement over and over improperly, then you’re teaching the muscles and nervous system that this is how you should move even if the movement itself is potentially unsafe or inefficient.
(Source: https://healthworksfitness.com/2017/07/31/muscle-memory-work/#:~:text=Muscle%20memory%20is%20a%20process,within%20our%20central%20nervous%20system and https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-new-brain/202106/how-does-muscle-memory-work)
MUSCLE MEMORY AND DNA: Researchers at Keele University show for the first time that human muscles possess a ‘memory’ at the DNA level. Using the latest genome wide techniques, the researchers studied over 850,000 sites on human DNA and discovered the genes marked or unmarked with special chemical tags when muscle grows following exercise, then returns to normal, and then grows again following exercise in later life. Known as epigenetic modifications, these markers or tags tell the gene whether it should be active or inactive, providing instructions to the gene to turn on or off without changing the DNA itself. The research has important implications in how athletes train, recover from injury, and has potentially far-reaching consequences for athletes caught cheating. “If an athlete’s muscle grows, and then they get injured and lose some muscle, it may help their later recovery if we know the genes responsible for muscle ‘memory’. Further research will be important to understand how different exercise programs can help activate these muscle memory genes,” said Adam Sharples, MD, Senior Lecturer in Cell and Molecular Muscle Physiology at Keele University.
* For More Information, Contact:
Curtis McGee
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